I don’t have any personal connection to the war.
I think it’s tragic that hundreds of thousands of people, mostly Iraqis but also American soldiers, died in the war.
I opposed the war because it was started based on bald-faced lies, unilaterally, and without any coherent strategy for the aftermath. The last part, in retrospect, is I think the worst thing about the war. I actually sympathize with the argument that, even if there weren’t WMD’s, Saddam was a cruel dictator and Iraq is better off without him. In the long run, Iraq might well be better off thanks to our intervention.
But the cost was too high, and that cost was due to the Bush administration’s criminal mismanagement of the war effort. Operating under the assumption that Iraqis would “welcome us as liberators,” disbanding the Baath forces (and thus leaving a security vacuum), appointing morons like Rumsfeld to lead the army, morons like Bremer in charge of the CPA who didn’t even speak Arabic, the moronic rules of engagement where 18-year-old kids with heavy weapons are supposed to fire at Iraqi cars who don’t stop at checkpoints… not to mention the institutionalized torture that came to a head at Abu Ghraib that was, beyond the immorality of the acts themselves, probably the single greatest propoganda victory and recruiting tool for Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia… it was just one clusterfuck after another, and the incompetence resulted in hundreds of thousands of innocent deaths, and a long-term black eye for American geopolitical strategic influence.
Though, I do think credit should go to Bush and Petraeus for the “surge,” which apparently did work (along with the Sunni Awakening and the fact that ethnic cleansing had already happened) to pacify the country. Bush’s Iraq policy eventually became more sane, and by the end of his second term he went a long way towards cleaning up his mess. Not that that excuses his first term’s foreign policy.